Piano Technical Exercises

While I’m not really a fan of relying on technical exercises for the development of piano technique, they can prove to be useful in some situations. Isolation of a particular pattern or figuration allow you to concentrate on that aspect of playing more thoroughly than you would if you also had to be thinking about phrasing, dynamics, rubato, etc. Still, the standard technical exercises that tends to be given to students I usually find to be painfully dull. So, here are a few exercises that I hope will be at least mildly pleasant to listen to while you play them. There are two sets, one for each hand, and they can be played as a set or each exercise individually. I have arranged them so that you may repeat each exercise indefinitely without interrupting the exercise.

This first set is for the right hand. It consists of six exercises covering Scales, Arpeggios, Trills, and Double Notes. The exercises are a kind of variations on a theme. Each exercise follows the same chord progression and, in fact, has exactly same left hand part. The Scale and Arpeggio exercises each have a preliminary version. Learn this first before you move on the the main exercise.

This next set follows the same pattern as the first but with the role of each hand reversed. Here, the left hand has the main exercise and the right hand plays the accompaniment. The chords in these exercises are also different to those in the first set.